EVENT: Alice in Halloweenland

I've never been a Disney princess kind of gal, but I've always loved Alice in Wonderland. I fell in love with the idea that Alice followed her little white rabbit, fell down the rabbit hole to discover a whole other nonsensical world full of madness and talking flowers and literary caterpillars that smoked and mad hatters who threw wild parties. So, when we decided to throw a Halloween party with a twist, I thought Alice in Wonderland would be a fun theme to try.

I may have gone a bit overboard with our decorations as I have a tendency to do, and we had so much fun creating our Mad Tea Party table complete with tiers of desserts and treats, a miniature mouse who fell asleep in a tea cup, plenty of signage with quotes from the movie, and of course, tea cups!

I dressed up as Alice, and my boyfriend, Larry, was the Mad Hatter. We had so much fun with these costumes, and he is a Disney fanatic, so he was very on board with this one.

The party started as soon as our guests walked in the door, which mimicked the falling down the rabbit hole thanks to the spinning lights we set up in the hallway as guests walked in.

At the end of the hallway, we set up a small table with the infamous talking doorknob from the movie, complete with mini bottles tied with "Drink Me" tags so that all of our guests had a signature drink to try as they entered the party.

The kitchen was the main display of food — our Mad Tea Party — where we featured bowls of Halloween candy, Pumpkin Fluff Dip (Fluff, Pumpkin, Cinnamon, Pumpkin Pie Spice) with some cookies and wafers to dip it in, chocolate donut "eyes" (which were Reeses Pieces stuck to chocolate donuts with a little icing), White Chocolate Mummy Pretzels, Peanut Butter Cup Bats (an Oreo cut in half to make wings, stuck to the PB cup with icing, Reeses Pieces for the eyes), "Eat Me" sugar cookies, pumpkin and banana walnut bread, and caramel popcorn. I love making displays of food like this with varying levels of height. I either use cupcake tiers or antique platters like I did here, or acrylic risers underneath flat platters to give things height. It makes the display more visually interesting, and it also allows you to fit more food in a smaller amount of space that way. Just a note — when you use the risers, always make sure they are very stable before you start adding food to your platters. I learned that lesson the hard way!

Our second table was the Queen of Hearts section, where we were "painting the roses red" on our cupcakes. We had oversized playing cards for our guests to play games with, and we ended up stacking them into a pretty cool tower by the end of the night.

I also made a giant caterpillar out of paper lanterns that I connected with glue dots and displayed on one of our outdoor lounge chairs because he's one of my favorite characters.

I wish I had taken better pictures of the outside, because we had the Cheshire Cat grinning and hanging up outside with a bunch of glow in the dark balloons and decorations to mimic the magic forest. Unfortunately, but the time I remembered to take photos, it was too dark. But it looked really cool!

We all had so much fun and it was one of my favorite parties to plan and put together. Here's a group picture of everyone who made it to the end of the night.

I finished my night with my Halloween tradition — a cup of hot apple cider and a butterfinger — because Halloween isn't complete for me with those two things.

Do you guys have any special Halloween traditions that you have to complete every year? Let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear them!